The Inequality of Pay in Pre-modern Germany, Late 15th Century to 1889

Abstract

Abstract The study explores relative labour scarcity in a broad range of activities and relates it to the long-run dynamics of structural change, supply and demand of human capital, and the inequality between men and women. It builds on two recent compilations of wage data and complements these with additional information, particularly on wages in agriculture. From the second quarter of the seventeenth century the skill premium was stable; the first phase of industrialization did not lead to a differentiation of the individual return to human capital. Labour demand from the modern sector stabilized real wages of males from the second quarter of the eighteenth century at least and increased them from the mid-1850s onwards. This opened a wedge between the agricultural and the non-agricultural sectors already for considerable time before the beginnings of industrialization. Finally, the modern era saw two phases of labour market segmentation along gender lines, one in the later sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries, the other from the 1840s to the 1870s.